Many Hands Make Light Work

It’s 2023 - I am sitting at my desk in my home office.

It’s hard to tell a compelling story in the years of the pandemic. It’s hard to convey a full range of emotions during this time period because they have been stretched and squashed and remolded beyond recognition at times. They are either too much, or not enough. 

I was likely feeling not enough when my previous employer informed me I would be taking a course on community organizing. Having no real understanding of what that even entailed, I was informed as the resident trainer it would make sense for me to attend and train a larger audience of the team. I agreed and logged off the meeting. 

A month later the course began and I immediately realized I had crashed the wrong party. Community Organizing is about mobilizing humans to get out from underneath oppressive systems, something that I was only just beginning to understand beyond my perspective as a white US military combat Veteran and all of the implications of indoctrination that came along with that. 

This course was for movements that actually mattered, not making US federal healthcare in sheep’s clothing more money. So much of the course involved getting intimately familiar with our classmates and championing their causes. I was painfully aware that I did not belong there, but luckily this was not my first karmic rodeo. I knew I had been put there for a reason and all I needed to do was stay present and receive. 

I learned more about life and the power of humanity in those four months than I did my entire life leading up to it. I stayed present, engaged and committed to the mission my classmates and I set out to accomplish. I laughed, I cried, I loved the people around me. I learned so much about myself and every other person I have or ever will come into contact with. 

The experience transcended the academic and catapulted the spiritual. During our last lecture, one of my classmates recounted celebrating a campaign milestone. She recalled looking around the room and noticing three members of her constituency chatting - one Jewish, one Muslim, one Christian. She shared with us a phrase from her native language, “I felt the pleasure of God in the room.”

To this day, remembering this brings me to tears. All of the labels we assign ourselves and each other, and yet these self-imposed separations do nothing to impede our collective power once finally reunited. In June, I left that final lecture a changed person with a desperately needed refreshed perspective on the good that exists in the world. 

Then October 7th happened. And every day after that. 

Produced by a nervous system under siege, the emotions we face as we watch the genocide of the Palestinian people do nothing but impede our inertia to act. 

And yet -

We do. We boycott companies fueling the agendas of the oligarchs. We educate Ourselves on the truth of the physical reality We have all passively or actively agreed to participate in. Amongst all of the mechanisms of division at play, We manage to organize. We manage to come together and work to Create the liberated world We know is possible.

We live in a world of nonstop awareness of global crises. We are constantly clocked in to navigate an environment carefully and purposely designed to wage war on our nervous systems. Who do you know that would actively choose to Create the world we are living in with all the details of truth? Too many relinquish their individual power by deciding that this is simply “how it is.” It can be better for you, and it can be better for everyone else, too.

Public pleas for support such as this often seek to incite a mobilizing sense of urgency here. Another competitor on the field in the game of who is actually in the driver’s seat of your life. Instead I would like to offer quite the opposite. I would like to offer calm reassurance that the campaign towards a better future for the collective is on course charted for success and your fellow humans will be so wonderfully grateful when your individual path returns you home. Home not being a place, but a true nature. One in which unity is effortless and separation does not exist. 

We have been on a collision course with this inevitability since the inception of time. Our future is not a matter of if, but when. As I’ve come to understand in so many arenas of my life, Our thoughts influence Our reality and the sooner we can all picture what true collective liberation feels like, the sooner it will arrive.

It is Our ability to create rather than simply manipulate that is Our collective power. Our ability to imagine and bring to life is the power We wield. Nothing is unless We agree it is. 

My call to action is this: For as long as You can muster, spend some time imagining what a world without worry could be. Where there is nothing separating Your heart from that of the person in front of You. A world where nothing competes for Your attention and Your only task is to be in the present moment. How would You spend those present moments? Where in Your life now do you find it is the easiest to simply be present? What will it feel like when none of the shadows of the past pull you back and none of the anxieties of the future pull you forward?

It is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when. 

There is a way You are meant to show up right now to help Us all get there. This is a unique time where seemingly discrete facets of Our reality continue to unveil themselves through intellectual and spiritual pursuits to reveal areas of coalescence. The only and simplest truth I am asking you to buy in to is that Our thoughts influence Our reality, individually and collectively. If You can meet me there, you can find the rest of the way Yourself.